


A High Wind in Cascade

by Laura JV (jacquez)



Series: Dog Tags [3]
Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-21
Updated: 2008-09-21
Packaged: 2017-10-02 00:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacquez/pseuds/Laura%20JV
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm fine, I'm fine, stop that or I'll smack you. Can we get out of here?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	A High Wind in Cascade

**Author's Note:**

> Jim and Blair would be much happier if they stayed with Pet Fly, but unfortunately for them, I have a bad habit of taking them out of the toybox and hurting them.

To hear Sandburg tell it, it was easy. He likes to make things sound  
easy, but they're not; they never are, or at least not as easy as he  
makes them sound. We were investigating an abandoned warehouse, close  
to where Lash had once held him captive, and I could tell he was a little  
shaky about that--and then I realized that the shaking wasn't all him.  
The earthquake hit, and the building shifted above us, and he looked  
up with a shocked expression on his face as the sounds became audible  
to him. I was already moving, because I could hear the building starting  
to fall, and knew I had to get us somewhere out of its path.

So we ended up in the building's bomb shelter, which wasn't entirely  
safe but it was sure as hell safer than the collapsing warehouse above  
us. "You OK?" I asked, when the world stopped moving, running my hands  
over him, checking for damage.

"I'm fine, I'm fine, stop that or I'll smack you. Can we get out of  
here?"

Get out of there we did. Not too hard, considering--we could have been  
trapped, all ways out could have been blocked, but they weren't. That  
was easy. Not as easy as Sandburg will tell you it was, but it was.  
Once outside, we made our way to my truck, and discovered it was dented  
and dusty, but most unharmed. We knocked some chunks of concrete off  
of the roof and hood and hopped in.

The police radio told us where we were needed, and where we could get  
to, and we were off and running. He turned on NPR, and then we both  
looked at each other and I could see him getting shaky again. All those  
jokes about Los Angeles falling into the ocean--they'd become, well,  
jokes, part of our culture, something harmless and silly to say. And  
now...well. After a minute, he inhaled deeply, smirked and said "Hey,  
now they can film a remake of 'Escape from L.A.' on site."

I shouldn't laugh when he says things like that, but I always do, and  
that time was no different.

While I was in the middle of laughing, we hit the roadblock.

It wasn't a roadblock the police radio would have told us about. It  
was the black-sedan and black-helicopter type of roadblock, the kind  
we'd planned and prepared for avoiding--and we ran straight into it.  
It made a certain kind of sense. In the mess of a major quake, who would  
notice we were gone? And if they did notice, who would suspect?

I reached over and squeezed his hand just before they opened the doors  
and pulled us out of the truck. We'd get through this. We'd have to.

They put me in a dark room, alone, and turned on the white noise generators.  
Sometimes, it occurs to me that I really do love Sandburg. The Master  
of Obfuscation himself had carefully noted the effects of Lee Brackett's  
generator, and carefully noted that I had to use special earplugs to  
help control my hearing, but had carefully failed to note that he'd taught  
me to filter out white noise when necessary.

I could also tell that they'd put a subdermal transmitter under the skin  
of my upper arm. Probably a GPS locator. I could sense its operation,  
and it made me vaguely ill--which could come in handy. I didn't touch  
it, didn't even indicate that I'd noticed it.

So I was alone and blind and--they thought--deaf and *located*. I clapped  
my hands a few times, sharply, and got a sense of the size of the room:  
about eight-by-ten, high-ceilinged, one-way glass along one side which  
meant they'd turn on the lights eventually. Small privacy screen around  
a toilet and sink. Then I sent out my hearing, looking for Blair. I  
knew he was close--I've been able to tell his general location, and he  
mine, ever since the day he died at the fountain, but I had trouble  
pinpointing.  
I finally found him when he started talking. "Jim, Jim, I know you can  
hear me. You there? Gotta map the place, OK? Figure out how to map  
it, and hey Jim, wouldn't it be nice to line all these guys up in a row  
and use them for target practice? I'm sure they've got white noise  
generators  
on you now, right? Thought of everything, didn't they?"

He was silent only when he slept, and even then I could hear his heartbeat  
and breathing, now that I had his location pinpointed. "Jim, I thought  
of something. I bet you can map the place by sound, Jim. The bat echo  
trick. I'll keep talking so you can use that to help, OK? Sound good?  
Today's topic: ways to make your Sentinel scream during sex. Way number  
one--"

I'd already thought of that way of mapping, and had been using it, but  
it was easier with his voice and with the increased activity of the  
daytime--if  
it was daytime. It was the light-cycle, at least, because they turned  
on the overhead lights in my room, and I dialed down my sight against  
the brightness of the florescent bulbs.

About halfway through the light-cycle, two guards came in, followed by  
a man in a suit. I listened to the door hum as it opened: electronic  
lock, then--no keys to steal. I'd have to think of something else.  
I looked up at the man in the suit and grinned involuntarily. He just  
*looked* like a government agent: slightly ill-fitting clothes, nervous  
but hiding it behind thin lips and an expressionless face. It occurred  
to me that Brackett would have been invaluable to these  
people--good-looking,  
open-faced, charming: everything this man was not. If Brackett hadn't  
been such a bastard, actually, Blair and I might have welcomed his  
companionship.  
He would have been useful in this situation, with that labyrinthine mind  
of his.

Of course, it was entirely possible that this situation was of his making.  
It's the sort of thing that he would do. I hadn't heard his voice anywhere,  
but that didn't mean he wasn't running the show from behind the scenes.  
I had to take that into account.

I used the voice of the man in the suit to fill in some details of my  
echo-map, and otherwise ignored him. After a while, I looked up at him  
and said, "I don't know what you guys injected me with, but my arm hurts,  
and I feel kind of sick." I touched the site of the transmitter briefly  
to indicate what I meant. He frowned and called for someone to let him  
out.

I ate some of the food the guards had brought, after carefully checking  
it for drugs, and considered the one-way glass as a means to an escape  
route.

The man in the suit came back the next light-cycle, and the next. I  
played progressively sicker and stopped using the arm with the transmitter  
in it. They'd know about some of the weird allergies and reactions I  
had from the dissertation; how were they to know that this wasn't a  
previously  
undiscovered side effect of Sentinelism? On the fourth cycle, when the  
man showed up, I looked up from my fetal position on the floor and said  
"You guys have got to talk to Sandburg about what you gave me. He'll  
know how to deal with it."

He blinked at that, and I let my eyes go wide. "You haven't talked to  
him. You haven't told him I'm sick." I let the shock in my voice slide  
into anger. "I swear, if you've killed him--" I climbed to my feet,  
keeping my arm dangling, and headed for him. The guards held me off,  
and the man in the suit frowned and called to be let out, after giving  
me a hard look. I struggled with the guards and then deliberately vomited  
on them.

They dropped me on the floor and followed the man in the suit out the  
door. I lay on the floor of my cell, smell dialed to nothing, my face  
in my own vomit, to wait and listen.

After fifteen minutes, I heard what I wanted to hear: a hospital gurney  
being wheeled down the hallway towards me. I pretended to pass out,  
and continued listening. Two orderlies, accompanied by two guards, came  
in and lifted me onto the gurney, where they strapped me firmly. I woke  
up and fought them a little, sluggishly, thinking all the while that  
my Covert Ops fellows would have been damn proud of this performance.  
This was better than the one I treated Colonel Oliver and his friends  
to.

Once in the hospital area, I let them put in an IV and then let every  
muscle in my body relax, as though I were sleeping. They cleaned me  
up and left me alone with a pair of guards. I continued listening.

There--they were moving Blair. From the echoes in his voice, I'd known  
he wasn't in a room with one-way glass, so they were moving him to an  
interrogation room now. I breathed steadily and evenly, and waited.

"Blair Jacob Sandburg."

"Yes," he said, his voice a little hoarse from talking to me for the  
past four days. They offered him a sip of water, which he didn't take.

"Mr. Sandburg, we've read everything you've ever published on Sentinels,  
and we have your dissertation..."

I tuned it out, mostly, only drifting back in to the conversation  
occasionally.

"...allergic reactions?"

"His reactions are unpredictable. He has severe allergies to a number  
of things, and is highly sensitive to substances most people don't react  
to. I believe that this is a manifestation of a compromised immune system  
due to stress, exposure to exotic disease pools, and extended contact  
with a number of toxic materials during his stint in the Army."

"So it's unrelated to his sentinel abilities?"

"I told you--my dissertation was a fraud."

"Mr. Sandburg, I do wish you'd tell us the truth..."

After a while, the talking tapered off, and then I heard them taking  
him back to his cell. I was out of the bed, IV ripping out of my arm  
as I moved towards the guards. I dropped the first with a punch and  
caught his semiautomatic rifle as he went down, firing it into the other  
guard. I took the clips out of their handguns and out of the second  
semiauto, then headed for Blair. He'd know I was coming, feel my movement  
along the connection between us.

I ran through the halls, the tile cool against my bare feet, following  
the map in my head, using my eyes only to scan for enemies. I thanked  
Blair over and over for forcing me to take a week's vacation and spend  
it blind, navigating only by sound. But then, he probably had something  
like this in mind when he'd done that.

As I got close to him, I heard the unmistakable *thump* of him falling  
against someone, and then the shift and slide of fabric and skin--and  
then a gun firing, once. I rounded the corner and saw him pulling the  
rifle from the body, a handgun in his other hand, and a guard who  
had...well...not  
so much of his head left. "Chief!"

"I just killed a guy, Jim."

"Yeah. Now, let's get the fuck out of here."

Get the fuck out of there we did. There was a bad moment in the ventilation  
shaft, when the alarms went off and that hurt, hurt horribly, but Blair  
got me through it. We made it to the hangar, and I heard myself thinking  
"This is too easy, too goddamn easy, easier even than Sandburg would  
make it sound, *fuck* they were expecting this and they're letting us  
do it--" and as I was thinking it, I shot out the controls of every chopper  
there except the one Blair had gotten running. I hopped in and smiled  
at him, glad to see him, glad to be with him, and we took off.

As he headed for our closest cache of escape materials, I found a small  
toolkit in the chopper and used it to cut out my transmitter. Blair  
set the chopper down about five miles from our hideout, and we jogged  
the rest of the way there. The first thing we did once we reached the  
cabin was to cut out his transmitter. Then we showered, shaved, and  
dressed. The old Jeep we had in the shed was already packed: money,  
some canned food, fake passports and other identification, and we drove  
to a nearby truck stop and duct-taped Blair's transmitter to the underside  
of one of the rigs before heading south, towards Mexico. After twenty  
miles, we took an exit and taped my transmitter to a Saturn with Texas  
plates, then turned around and headed for Canada.

We made it to the border, and through, without being stopped. When we  
reached Edmonton, we booked two flights for each of us: one going to  
Houston, and one to Miami. Then, because we hoped like hell that that  
Saturn was headed for Texas, we got on the Miami flight. Once in Miami,  
we booked a flight to Lima--using different, still fake, passports--and  
stole a cell phone, which I used to call our lawyer in Cascade and tell  
him to send out the videotapes and letters he was keeping for us.

In Lima, we rented a hotel room--paid for a week, in advance--and slept  
for sixteen hours straight. We hadn't dared to sleep on the flight--I  
was monitoring communications, and Blair was monitoring me--and so when  
we got there, we'd been on the run for almost thirty hours, and awake  
for almost forty-eight. I woke up with Blair's mouth warm on my cock,  
and I could sense how desperate he was to reconnect us, to find life  
in the middle of this goddamn mess. He'd killed a man for the first  
time less than three days ago, and he was searching for human contact,  
for an affirmation of life.

I remembered the first time I killed someone, and how I'd found my  
affirmation  
in a hand job behind the base mess hall. I was twenty-two, and scared,  
and now Blair was thirty, and scared. I pulled him up until he was next  
to me, and reached down into the duffel bag for lube and condoms. (The  
way we'd figured it, if we were on the run, we might not have time to  
buy supplies. Boy Scouts to the bone, we'd put lubricant and condoms  
in all of our scattered caches.) I didn't take much time preparing him,  
but then, he didn't need it--he wanted this, badly, and he raised himself  
on his hands and knees, back arched, head down, so goddamn fucking sexy  
and so goddamn fucking hurt--the last bit of the enthusiastic grad student  
I'd met subsumed, finally and forever, by Blair the warrior, Blair the  
practical, Blair the cop, Blair the hunted, Blair the killer. Blair  
the Guide.

I kissed him between his shoulder blades and slid into him, wrapping  
one arm around his chest and leaning back so that he was sitting on my  
thighs as I knelt behind him. "Please," he said, softly, his voice broken,  
and I began to move slowly. "No," he said, and I stopped and felt the  
connection between us spring to life. "Hard, Jim." His voice was still  
soft, but the fierceness beneath it was evident. He was hard himself,  
now, hard and tough and no longer innocent of anything, and I could sense  
the need in him to feel that loss of innocence.

So I pushed him back onto his hands and knees and fucked him, hard, digging  
my fingers into his hips and feeling the tension in him, growing, moving  
through him until it broke--he broke--and we both came. Afterward, he  
held me for a while, then dragged me into the bathroom to shower with  
him. As he washed my back, he suddenly said, "I wish I hadn't had to  
kill him, but I'm not sorry I did."

"I wish you hadn't had to kill him, either."

He laughed. "But you're not sorry I did?"

"Hell, no."

"Good."

We rinsed off and stepped out of the shower, shaved, and went out to  
buy hiking gear, which we repacked our supplies into. Then we bought  
a ramshackle truck and headed for Chopec territory, using the illegal  
road Cyclops oil had cut into the jungle years ago. Once there, we'd  
be as safe as we could possibly be; no one the Chopec didn't want in  
their land lived very long.

Once there, we could take the time to plan. Once there, perhaps Blair  
would regain some of his patented enthusiasm.

But as I looked at him beside me, his short dark hair brushed back, his  
eyes closed, and his hands resting lightly on his knees, I didn't think  
so. "Stop it, Jim," he said, his tone sharp.

"Stop what?"

"Stop thinking 'yet another thing Blair's given up for me.'" I flinched,  
then grinned wryly at him as he opened his eyes. "I chose this freely.  
This is who I am."

"Yeah," I said, knowing what he meant, remembering dog tags that smelled  
of fuel and oil and Blair, and the way he'd looked at me and told me  
he was my partner, with the chain tangled around his fingers. "Yeah,  
Sandburg, I know."

* * *

  
The End. 


End file.
